Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie's desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status.

Bone Cage examines how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of their shift. Bone Cage is about the difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.

Plays by Catherine Banks include Bone Cage; Eula's Offer; The Summer of the Piping Plover; Three Storey, Ocean View; and Bitter Rose. Bitter Rose has aired on Bravo! Canada. Her work has been performed in Manitoba, Toronto, Calgary, and St. John's at the LSPU Hall. Three Storey, Ocean View won the Silver Medal in the 1995 du Maurier National Play Competition and was nominated for a Merrit Award for best new play in 2000. Bone Cage was awarded the Special Merit prize in the 2002 Theatre BC New Play Competition and was showcased at the National Arts Centre's On the Verge in 2005. Her work is poetic, darkly humorous, courageous and beautifully theatrical. Some of her characters, Lud in Three Storey Ocean View and Clarence in Bone Cage, have been described as Atlantic Gothic. Always a writer, Catherine started professional life as a special education teacher. She began writing plays while raising her children, Rilla and Simon. She currently lives and writes in Sambro, Nova Scotia.

Catherine Banks' profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

"Bone Cage is a bold and satisfying new play about a young man trapped in a soul-killing industry in rural Nova Scotia. This drama is like a David Adams Richards novel in its bleak, unflinching look at rural life'. Where Adams Richards is grimly poetic' Banks goes for a black humour and a touch of the surreal."

The Chronicle Herald

"Wildly ambitious, urgently contemporary, and savagely frank, it dares to examine a rural Nova Scotia way of life with all its warts and joy. 'courageous, poetic, powerful' Banks provides enough late adolescent and early adult joy to remind us all that these are tough, real characters who take their enjoyment when they can get it."

Infomonkey.net